Crepes à Latte Names Robin Cardoso President

Growing Without Losing the Feeling

There is a particular kind of risk that comes with growing something good. Ask any founder who has watched a beloved local idea turn into a national name, and they will tell you the hardest part was never the growth itself. It was holding onto the feeling that made people love the thing in the first place.

That is the tension sitting at the center of the news out of Crepes à Latte this week: the nationally recognized experiential hospitality company, known for its work at trade shows, corporate events, and branded environments across the country, has named Robin Cardoso as its new President.

A Leader Built for Scale

Robin arrives with more than 20 years of leadership experience spanning hospitality, customer experience, and business transformation, with stops at Starbucks, WeWork, and Crafty along the way. At those companies she built high-performing teams and strengthened the operational backbone needed to deliver consistent experiences at scale, the kind of work that rarely makes headlines but quietly determines whether a growing company holds together or comes apart at the seams.

CEO Hailey Rosenstein described the appointment as a deliberate piece of organizational design, built to protect the entrepreneurial spirit and people-first culture that has defined Crepes à Latte since its earliest days alongside co-founder Michael Rosenstein.

Hailey put it plainly: "Crepes à Latte has always been about more than what we serve. It's about how we make people feel, the relationships we build, and the culture we create together. Robin brings exceptional experience and a genuine appreciation for our entrepreneurial spirit. Our strengths are complementary, and I'm excited about what we'll build together."

Robin's own account of why she took the role leans on the same language of culture and people rather than titles or growth charts. "What attracted me to Crepes à Latte was its culture, its people, and the opportunity to build on something already special," she said. "I'm excited to partner with Hailey and our employee-owners to build on that foundation and create new opportunities for our clients and team."

Two Leaders, Two Lanes

The arrangement the two women have settled into is not a handoff. It is a split designed to let each person work from her own strengths.

As President, Robin will take on day-to-day operations, organizational development, talent strategy, and client experience, along with the systems needed to keep execution consistent across the company's events work. Hailey will stay focused on innovation, industry relationships, key partnerships, and new business development as CEO.

It is a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched growing hospitality companies mature: the founder keeps the vision and the relationships, while an operational executive is brought in to build the people systems and service infrastructure that a startup phase simply never required. Naming talent strategy and client experience explicitly as part of Robin's remit is a quiet signal that the company expects to keep growing, and growing in ways that will ask more of its internal systems than it has in the past.

An Employee-Owned Foundation

What makes this particular leadership story worth watching closely is the ownership structure sitting underneath it. Crepes à Latte is 100% employee-owned through its Employee Stock Ownership Plan, meaning the people who deliver the work hold a genuine financial stake in whether it succeeds.

That detail reframes the entire hire. Hailey tied the appointment directly back to that foundation: "We have talented people, strong client relationships, and a shared commitment to hospitality. Adding Robin's leadership is an investment in that foundation, and in building a company that will create opportunities for generations to come."

Few competitors in the experiential hospitality and events space can say the same about their ownership model, where equity tends to stay concentrated among founders or outside investors rather than spread across the workforce that shows up every day to make the experience happen.

Built to Outlast One Tenure

Framing the hire around "generations to come" suggests this was never meant as a reactive move to patch a gap in leadership. It reads instead as part of a longer succession story, one where the governance structure of the company is built to outlast any single executive's tenure, which matters a great deal when the people doing the work also own a piece of the outcome.

That is likely why the roles were split rather than simply reassigned: a company moving toward more formalized operations, while still owned by the employees who built it, needs a structure sturdy enough to hold both ambition and loyalty at once.

Steadier Service on the Horizon

For clients in the trade show and corporate events world, the practical stakes are fairly clear. Crepes à Latte has built its name on premium food and beverage experiences for convention centers, branded environments, and corporate gatherings, blending culinary creativity with the kind of service reliability that keeps clients coming back.

Robin's background building customer-focused systems at large organizations facing their own scaling pressures may translate directly into steadier, more consistent service as the company takes on more work.

If the partnership performs the way both women describe it, with Hailey's relationships and vision paired against Robin's operational discipline, Crepes à Latte looks positioned to grow its footprint in branded hospitality without losing the collaborative, accountability-driven culture it has spent years building, one trade show floor and one branded event at a time.

Growing Without Losing the Feeling